The Perfect News Reader

I often say that I live and die by my RSS news feeds. Yes, it’s an exaggeration but it does exemplify how important news feeds are to me. The tech world is constantly changing and every year, it feels that the change is accelerating. It makes sense – as technology becomes both faster and cheaper, there are new ways to solve different problems. Old limitations start to disappear and things that used to seem impossible are now very possible. With that in mind, I’ve been trying to find the perfect RSS newsreader for a while now. The apps I use to source my information today are Feedly, FeedAFever, NewsBlur, Flipboard and News360. They all have their strengths and weaknesses which prompted me to write this blog entry about the perfect news reader.

The perfect newsreader for me would allow me to focus on the articles that are most important or interesting to me. It would also go beyond the news feeds that I already subscribe to and introduce new articles or feeds to me as it learns more about me.

It would also group articles by topics. Often times, there are many articles written about the same topic. It’d be great to see them in a group and allow me to mark that topic as read or allow me to archive that topic which would essentially mean that any article associated with that topic would automatically be marked as read.

One of the best ways to know if a topic is well worth looking into is to leverage my network. My friends are experts in certain areas. If a particular friend shares an article, I’d often be interested in it. It’s also an easy way of introducing new articles or feeds about things that interest me.

Time is scarce and there will always be more information that I can consume. The goal of the perfect newsreader would be to allow me to focus on the things that are most relevant to me.